By Roger Pearce
Vladimir Putin’s network of supporters among European fascists are celebrating today after the victory of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern German state of Thuringia.
AfD’s Thuringian branch is led by the Kremlin’s main German asset, Björn Höcke. They will have 32 of their state parliament’s 88 seats. Adding to Russian glee, another Moscow asset, Sahra Wagenknecht (a more successful German version of George Galloway) saw her nominally left-wing party BSW claim third place with 15.8%.
There were similar results in Saxony, where the conservative CDU only just held on to pole position, with the two pro-Moscow parties AfD and BSW finishing second and third.
Yet Putin’s friends only have to look west and east to see the dangers of working for the Kremlin.
In Paris, the founder of Telegram – for years the app of choice for nazi terrorists, paedophiles, and Russian agents – is facing serious criminal charges. Several observers have speculated that the detention of Pavel Durov is actually a cover for his defection, and that the ‘private’ messages of both far right activists and Russian spies are now in the hands of French security services.
Just days after Durov’s arrest, a 50-year-old Russian nazi mysteriously choked to death in a Moscow restaurant.
Maxim Eremin (above, left) made his name in the 1990s as a notorious hooligan, co-founding the ‘Red-Blue Warriors’ gang at CSKA Moscow.
But for the past twenty years he was a Russian intelligence officer, reaching the rank of colonel in the FSB and participating in atrocities in Chechnya, the Middle East, and Ukraine.
By his late 40s, Eremin stepped back from frontline violence and became an important recruiter of far-right hooligans from other European countries, especially Serbia, into the ‘Moskva’ reconnaissance battalion of the 106th Airborne Division.
One of Eremin’s allies in this hooligan recruitment drive was Alexander Zaldastanov, a former nightclub bouncer who leads the Night Wolves, Russia’s largest biker gang. Another was Marko Milošević, a fugitive Serbian gangster whose father Slobodan Milošević died in his prison cell in 2006 while on trial for war crimes committed during his years as Serbian dictator during the 1990s.
Eremin had risen from hooligan streetfighter to intelligence officer and prosperous businessman. But perhaps he knew too much for the FSB’s comfort. Last week while dining in a Moscow restaurant, he supposedly got a piece of meat stuck in his throat and asphyxiated. It makes a change from falling out of windows.
Some of those recruited by Eremin from the ranks of European neo-nazis, whether as mercenaries or as spies within supposedly pro-Ukrainian far right movements, will now be feeling nervous.
In addition to the 106th associated with Eremin, and the far more famous mercenary ‘Wagner Group’, another Russian unit that has recruited nazi hooligans from around the world is the so-called Española Volunteer Brigade, led by one of Eremin’s fellow CSKA hooligans, Stanislav Orlov.
The unit’s name is due to Orlov having learned Spanish and built some Spanish connections. One of the few actual Spaniards who has fought with the Española Brigade is the mercenary Juan Manuel Soria (above, cetre), known as ‘Simon de Monfort’, who once led the Valencia branch of the neo-fascist party Alianza Nacional. AN is linked to one of Moscow’s main allies on the European far right, Roberto Fiore, who has been well-known to Searchlight readers for more than forty years.
Together with his old friends from CSKA, Orlov has recruited for his Brigade among many other hooligan firms including Spartak Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg. His propaganda was boosted when former international footballer Andrey Solomatin, and mixed martial arts fighter Mikhail Turkanov, both joined Española.
A third neo-nazi unit is Rusich, which like many other mercenary gangs had experience in Africa and Syria before being employed in Ukraine. Rusich’s leader Alexey Milchakov is a Zenit hooligan who openly describes himself as a Nazi and revels in sadism. Two weeks ago, Rusich broadcast an appeal for other Russian units to provide them with a suitable Ukrainian prisoner to be used in a ritual human sacrifice.
Milchakov’s deputy Yan Petrovsky (alias Voislav Torden) is jailed in Finland awaiting trial. He built strong connections with Scandinavian nazis, including members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, which was recently proscribed by the US authorities as a terrorist organisation.
Petrovsky and Milchakov met through the Russian Imperial Movement, which has spent years networking among the European far right. The RIM was involved in a high profile International Russian Conservative Forum, held in St Petersburg in 2015, where guests included two of the leaders of American racism, Sam Dickson and Jared Taylor.
Several social rungs below the well-heeled Dickson and Taylor is the most prominent American recruit to the Española Brigade, the rockabilly barber and social media influencer ‘Teddy Boy Greg’ (above, right).
After Eremin’s ‘accidental’ asphyxiation, his weird gang of misfits and psychopaths must now be wondering whether it’s more dangerous to be on the frontline against resurgent Ukrainian forces, or in a Moscow restaurant under the watchful eye of the FSB.